Samsung S4: just say ‘when’.

When Samsung’s flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, goes on sale this Saturday at Telstra, Optus, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone for $899, you’ll be able to buy a device that quite conceivably has more features than any phone ever released.

If you live in Sydney or Melbourne, you could even buy the feature-rich phone before Saturday.

At the Sydney Opera House, where
Samsung
launched the Galaxy S4 on Tuesday night, and at Samsung’s flagship stores in Australia’s two biggest cities, the phone will be available for pre-sale from Wednesday morning, making Australia one of the first countries to sell what is expected to be the second most popular consumer electronics device in the world this year, behind Apple’s iPhone. But customers buying the phone early still won’t be able to pick it up until Saturday.

But will customers be getting a phone that simply has too many features, or as Samsung itself puts it, does the SGS4 have “just the right amount of features"?

(The question of whether the phone has too few features is not really on the table this time around. We’re talking here about a phone that, for instance, you can control by waving your hands in the air, without even touching its screen.

One that watches your eyes, and pauses any video it’s playing the moment you look away from the screen. One that can take photos using both its rear camera and its front camera at the same time.)

The question of whether a phone can have too many attributes is not as absurd as it may sound, and indeed it’s one that Samsung itself will address in coming weeks and months, as it rolls out its “hero" device.

With hundreds of new features in the phone, layered on top of the ­hundreds that were already in the ­Galaxy S III, there’s the very real risk that useful things could simply go undiscovered by many consumers. Who knew, for instance, that you can quickly get to the WiFi settings on a Galaxy phone, just by long-pressing the WiFi icon on the phone’s notification panel? (I owned a Galaxy for years before someone pointed that one out to me. All these years I was doing it the hard way.)

Related Quotes

Company Profile

The problem isn’t helped by the fact that Samsung sells its phones with a number of their fancier tricks turned off, making it harder for users to stumble upon the fact that, for instance, they can turn off their alarm clock just by yelling at it, or take photos just by saying “cheese".(You’ve been able to do those things with a Samsung Galaxy S phone for a while, too, but the setting to turn them on is buried in the phone’s “S Voice" settings, and many people don’t know about them or forget they’re there.)

Tyler McGee
, vice-president of telecommunications at Samsung Australia, said that, with so many new things in the SGS4, the company will offer tutoring in the device, to help users discover the features they want.

Samsung is also making training videos, which it will put on the internet, with lessons, tips and tricks for the phone.

But many of the new features in the SGS4 are grouped together, and so will be easy to discover without recourse to training, Mr McGee said.

Like a number of phones launched this year, many of the new features in the SGS4 have to do with the camera, and so they’re all easy to find, right there in the camera app.

Not that it really matters if some features go undiscovered by users.

At the initial launch of the phone in New York in March, company officials were open about the fact that they threw everything they could think of into the SGS4, aware that any one consumer would only ever need a subset of the features. But, still, it does make for a dizzying device.

And all of this is not to say that the SGS4 wants for nothing, of course. Sony’s Xperia Z can be submerged in water and still keep working – something the Galaxy S4, with its removable polycarbonate back would never survive. HTC’s One has an aluminium back that makes the Galaxy S4 look . . . well, look positively plastic by comparison. (It is plastic. Polycarbonate is just a fancy word for very strong plastic.)

And, indeed, there are even features in the SGS4 that will be lacking in the Australian version that goes on sale on Saturday. Models with 32 or 64 gigabytes of memory won’t be available at the time of the launch, Samsung says, and the highly publicised “octa-core" version of the phone, with a whopping eight processing cores, won’t be here at launch, either: only the quad-core version.